Elizabeth Jolley – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.24 SUGAR MOTHER by Elizabeth Jolley /2010/sugar-mother-by-elizabeth-jolley/ Mon, 27 Dec 2010 13:18:43 +0000 /?p=14672 Book Quote:

“The combination of having too much to drink and a genuine lack of desire towards an unchosen partner were the ingredients for a certain kind of unhappiness.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (DEC 27, 2010)

In Sugar Mother, middle-aged Australian OB/GYN Cecilia Page leaves for a year-long fellowship abroad. Her husband, English professor Edwin decides not to accompany her in spite of the fact that she “asked repeatedly” that he join her. This is not the first occasion of separation; Cecilia enjoys travel and hotel rooms, but Edwin does not. He prefers his “pleasantly shabby” home, along with his routine and no expectation of surprises.

While Edwin and Cecilia, a childless couple, appear to be the epitome of conservatism, even they have their mad moments. Their “flings” however are confined to monthly wife-swapping parties composed of a handful of couples their own age and income status. It’s through this bizarre monthly ritual, organized by Cecelia to continue in her absence, that Jolley’s wicked sense of humour spears the naughty, extra-marital play in suburbia. In Edwin’s circle of friends, even wife-swapping is staged, boring, obligatory, predictable, and above all safe.

In many ways, Edwin is disconnected to his home and to his life. Cecilia is the great organizer, and she finds it easy to make friends. While Edwin is proud of Cecilia, there’s also the sense that their shared life is predominantly her creation. Edwin is too colourless and mild to create his own or to take a stand against Cecilia’s forceful character. But there’s one thing in which Edwin is the master, and that’s in his hypochondria:

“Edwin had three books of the body in which he kept notes. The books were the external, the internal and the intangible. The book of the skin (the external) had separate pages for different places on the body. He planned at some stage to have a series of maps like ordnance survey maps (in sections) of the human body, his body, with special methods of marking wrinkles, hair, moles, bruises, pimples, dry patches and the rather more unusual blemishes. Every page had its own legend and scale and he hoped, ultimately, to make an accurate index. All three books had stiff covers and blank pages fro drawings and diagrams alternating the lined pages for the written comments. Faithfully he kept the records, three valuable collections of human data. There were no limits to the notes he was able to make. He often imagined Cecilia’s pleasure at receiving the copies, handsomely bound, at some time in the future, after he was dead.”

Obviously Edwin has too much time on his hands. Little does this fussy, aging man suspect that his ordered life is about to become very complicated.

As soon as Cecilia leaves, the peculiar neighbours next door, Mrs. Botts and her lumpish daughter Leila suffer a series of catastrophes. First they are locked out of their home (a house in which it’s guaranteed they won’t be raped). Then the house is overrun with rats and must be fumigated. These disasters send the conniving Mrs. Botts and Leila to the Pages’ home, and with Cecilia absent, they basically move in and stay….

Sugar Mother is a darkly humorous tale that centres on Edwin’s dilemma. How can he get rid of guests who continuously create new excuses to stay? At first Edwin is willing to go to any lengths to get rid of them, but then soon he finds himself enjoying Mrs. Botts’s cooking and Leila’s company. He has a year to sort the problem before his wife returns home, but a lot can happen in a year.

Bizarre behaviour clashes then blends with the appearance of normalcy in Jolley’s understated and witty comedy of manners. As with Foxybaby, Sugar Mother also presents a world laced with lunacy and eccentricity.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 3 readers
PUBLISHER: Persea; Reprint edition (November 9, 2010)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Elizabeth Jolley
EXTRAS: Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Foxybaby

The Vera Wright Trilogy

Bibliography:

Non-fiction:

]]> FOXYBABY by Elizabeth Jolley /2010/foxybaby-by-elizabeth-jolley/ Sun, 05 Dec 2010 15:03:54 +0000 /?p=13966 Book Quote:

“If I hear you say once more that the women’s prison is too small and that more women, especially the middle-aged and the elderly should be locked up—I’ll—never mind what I’ll do.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (DEC 5, 2010)

Nothing prepared me for Elizabeth Jolley’s novel Foxybaby. What was I expecting? Well a gentle novel, a comedy of manners, perhaps? Instead Foxybaby is packed with quirky characters whose attendance at a private summer course unleashes a range of odd behaviours.

The novel begins with an exchange of letters between novelist, Alma Porch and Josephine Peycroft, the principal of Trinity College. Alma, who’s also a teacher at a girls’ school agrees to teach a drama course at Trinity College’s summer programme for overweight adults: “Better Body Through the Arts.” The opening exchange of letters sets the stage for the novel’s tone as Alma and Miss Peycroft attempt to work out their artistic differences.

The increasingly testy tone of the letters should set off alarm bells for Alma (they did for this reader), but perhaps Alma’s enthusiasm blinds her to the knowledge that all is not well at Trinity College. She sails off into the Australian outback in her “battered Volkswagen” with her head packed full of ideas for her drama course:

“Enjoying the delightful feeling of escape she sang tunelessly, something operatic, and nodded her head in time to her own aria. She was on her way to Cheathem East. Occasionally she stopped singing to listen, from habit, with some anxiety to the rattle of her engine. This noise being sustained as usual she let her mind race ahead. She hoped Trinity College would live up to her expectations. She thought about sunflowers. Sunflowers with heads as big as dinner plates, golden sunflowers in the corners of old buildings and by crumbling walls. She hoped they would be growing in Cheatham East.”

Alma’s rosy illusions about Trinity College are about to be shattered. The first warning of what’s in store occurs when she ploughs her Volkswagen into the back of a bus parked in the middle of a curved road. While this at first appears to be an accident, this is just one of many scams perpetrated by the lecherous Miles, whose nebulous position at the school is strangely tolerated by Miss Peycroft. When Miles isn’t ripping off the students and teachers with his various schemes, he hangs out in a room in which “everything [that was] there seemed to be for sale.” In the creation of Miss Peycroft and Miles, there are shades of Miss Fritton and Flash Harry from the marvellous British St Trinian’s films.

Alma’s accident–her strange introduction to the school–is but a hint of what’s in store. Two of the teachers don’t speak English, and Trinity College is a dump. The students are there ostensibly to loose weight, so the food is meager (if it appears at all). Alma’s room is soon invaded by Mrs. Castle, a student who can’t stop hammering on about her grandchildren and Siamese cats. But there are stranger things afoot; orgies and assignations are commonplace, and Miss Peycroft, “reputed to be a one time prioress, till she jumped off a wall,” may be the inamorata of another female teacher. Any normal person would run from Trinity College and its collection of nuts. Alma, however is determined to put on her play, She’s so wrapped up with its creation that she chooses to ignore a great deal, and when her mind does absorb the strangeness surrounding her, she simply becomes sleepy.

Foxybaby is primarily a humorous novel of eccentricity with its characters moving from their own bizarre lives and social relationships into the dreadful play, Foxybaby. The novel is reminiscent of a Shirley Jackson tale in which a normal person strays into some horrific environment and is trapped. Foxybaby isn’t horrific, however, although incidents that in other circumstances would be horrific take place (the staged car accident, for example). There’s no threat of danger–except to one’s sanity–in Jolley’s novel. Here’s Miss Peycroft discussing a course called Basic Self Expression:

“That’s Mrs. Viggars,” Miss Peycroft said, “the one sitting in the cardboard-box, rather a squeeze but she managed it ultimately. Luckily Miles found something big enough, a console television carton or was it a double-door refrigerator…”

“Whatever is that on her head?” Miss Porch in her curiosity, forgot good manners and interrupted Miss Peycroft, who did not seem to mind.

“Oh that. That’s a cushion,” she said. “It was hilarious. They all wore cushions on their heads and rocked across the courtyard in the boxes. Great fun!”

Just think of a scenario in which the patients take over the asylum. Make that asylum Trinity College and you get the picture. What’s so curious here is that Alma doesn’t seem to even notice the nuttiness that surrounds her. She’s dotty and giddy, and when she’s exposed to some really awful behaviour, her reactions to the Trinity College crowd create an even stranger situation. This darkly comic tale will appeal to those who love novels of eccentricity and the many foibles of human nature.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 1 readers
PUBLISHER: Persea (November 9, 2010)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Elizabeth Jolley
EXTRAS: Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

The Vera Wright Trilogy

Sugar Mother

Bibliography:

Non-fiction:

]]> THE VERA WRIGHT TRILOGY by Elizabeth Jolley /2010/the-vera-wright-trilogy-by-elizabeth-jolley/ Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:38:41 +0000 /?p=10043 Book Quote:

“I have a corner seat in this train by a mistake which is not entirely my fault. The woman, who is in this seat, asks me if I think she has time to fetch herself a cup of tea. I can see that she badly wants to do this and, in order that she does not have to go without the tea, I agree that, though she will be cutting it fine, there is a chance that she will have time. So she goes and I see her just emerging from the refreshment room with a look on her face which shows how she feels. She has her tea clutched in one hand and I have her reserved seat because it is silly, now that the train has started, to stand in the corridor being crushed by army greatcoats and kitbags and boots, simply looking at the emptiness of this comfortable corner.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (JUN 13, 2010)

Although she wrote all her life, Jolley didn’t get her first book published until she was 53. Thereafter she published 15 novels, four story collections and four non-fiction books. The daughter of an Austrian mother and English father and a transplant to Australia from England, she became one of Australia’s most celebrated authors and won at least 16 awards. Yet by the time of her death in 2007, her books were out of print. This new edition of her acclaimed autobiographical trilogy brings these three novels — My Father’s Moon / Cabin Fever / The Georges’ Wife — together in one volume in the U.S. for the first time. The conclusion, The George’s Wife, was never before published here though it won major awards and accolades in Australia.

Having read My Father’s Moon and Cabin Fever years ago, I can tell you it makes a difference having the final volume, but even more – reading the books in one volume changes the experience. There’s a disjointed quality to Vera’s narration and a rhythm to the prose, which creates a deep intimacy when all three books are read together. The format also satisfies the build-up of suspense and relieves certain frustrations with Vera’s sometimes self-destructive passivity.

As My Father’s Moon opens in post-WWII England, Vera is departing with her illegitimate daughter, Helena, for a teaching position at a progressive boarding school, Fairfields. Her mother is distressed that she is taking the child, but then her mother is distressed at the whole mess Vera has made of her promising life. And thirty pages later, as if to underscore her series of bad choices, Vera is waiting at the end of a train line, having left squalid, abusive Fairfields and thrown herself on the mercy of a nursing colleague she hasn’t communicated with in five years.

Each of the ten sections focuses on an aspect of Vera’s life, which illuminate the story’s center – her wartime nursing (instead of the university her parents had hoped for) and her own naivety, self-absorption and insecurity. From Fairfield her perspective returns to childhood and boarding school, the wartime refugees her mother aided, a lesbian affair, a beloved neighbor whose warnings go unanswered, and pivotal incidents in her war experience. Fractured repetitions offer new depth, details or interpretations of events.

From her poor but bookish home life and the typical child’s impatience with her mother’s foreign accent to the casual cruelty of dormitory girls in a hidebound, lawless environment, which is uneasily echoed in nurses’ housing, Vera is flatly, musingly honest about her own failings and loneliness. At school Vera torments a girl she calls Bulge, for no more reason than physical antipathy. As a new nurse, she’s in thrall to a roommate who she keeps in cigarettes and spending money. Taken up by a doctor and his wife who move in moneyed, bohemian, dissolute circles, she feels herself uplifted, cosseted and loved, only to find herself seduced and abandoned.

As Cabin Fever opens Vera is a doctor in a hotel at a conference. And that’s about all we find out about that. “Memories are not always in sequence, not in chronological sequence.” Structured like My Father’s Moon in interconnected sections, Vera remembers Helena’s birth, her horrible, stultifying experience as a mother’s helper, her removal to the nursing home to have her baby and her extended stay there, all of it intertwined with wartime and childhood memories. Loneliness looms large, but there’s a fair amount of humor too as Vera limits her focus to getting through the day.

In book three, The Georges Wife, Vera makes the same mistakes all over again, longing for love. “I suppose I shall be lonely, Mr. George, I suppose that, one day, I shall have to be alone. I shall be lonely.” Taking a position as a servant to an unmarried brother and sister quite set in their ways, she has a second child. But this time there is no running away and no abandonment though Mr. George (as she still thinks of him) keeps putting off their marriage. She goes to medical school, and takes up with a strange couple not of her class – echoes of her postwar youth. But this time she gets her education and eventually emigrates to Australia with Mr. George.

From her perspective as a psychologist Vera does not spare herself: “I am a shabby person. I understand, if I look back, that I have treated kind people with an unforgivable shabbiness. For my work a ruthless self-examination is needed. Without understanding something of myself, how can I understand anyone else.” Of course, most of us could say the same if we were honest. Jolley says it in a trilogy of beguiling rumination, exploring a half-century of history through one woman’s very personal experience. Though largely tossed about by life, drifting into circumstances and relationships of least resistance, Vera finally gets a grip on herself and her future and perhaps that’s what maturity is all about, even if it’s still a lonely place.

Jolley’s prose is intimate, poetic and unflinching. The disjointed structure builds upon itself with an almost mesmerizing quality. Though less humorous than much of her fiction, the trilogy is a work of emotional depth and beauty, which will be enjoyed by anyone who likes to wrap themselves in compelling, artful fiction.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 5 readers
PUBLISHER: Persea; 1 edition (April 13, 2010)
REVIEWER: Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Elizabeth Jolley
EXTRAS: Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: See this one, for a contrast:

Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann

And more by Elizabeth Jolley:

Foxbaby

Sugar Mother

Bibliography:

Non-fiction:

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